driven to the sea, then across it, to the colonies of what was now Canada and the US.
The Scots, I knew, liked to paint this pretty episode in their history as English domination and cruelty. The truth was that the conflict had been primarily Scot against Scot: Protestant against Catholic, Lowlander against Highlander. And the lairds and landowners who had driven the masses from their crofts had been their own kind. And often the Chiefs of the clans they belonged to.
Every now and again, I would pass evidence of the purge: roofless croft cottages, more like piles of roughly assembled stones, standing empty and barely perceptible in the gloom, in the middle of a trackless landscape or looming suddenly at the roadside.
The sky turned violet and the stars sparkled like the frost in my headlights. Up here, there was no city streetlight glow to obscure the stars, and the night remained bright and sharp and cold. Again, I had to stop a couple of times to fix my bearings with the map I had taken from Ellis’s shed. The road here was only wide enough for one car to pass and was intermittently blistered with marked passing places, just wide enough to fit a car or tractor in to allow oncoming vehicles to pass. Some passing places came perilously close to where the edge dropped away steeply and suddenly into a gorge which, in the growing dark, turned into a bottomless chasm.
The narrow ribbon of road ahead of me became reduced to a frost-edged pool of light from my headlamps, and I found that bends would appear without warning. Some were unexpectedly sharp. Driving here in the daylight would be challenge enough, but in the dark it was a nightmare.
I just didn’t see it coming. The road had been perfectly straight for half a mile, then took an almost right- angular twist. I slammed on the brakes, but the Cresta simply skated along the road, not responding to anything I did with the steering wheel.
The world slowed down. I took my foot off the brake, reapplied it gently, took it off, reapplied it.
Nothing worked.
Straight ahead of me was darkness, the road gone.
It was the strangest thing: to feel nothing beneath the wheels. To know you were in a motor car suspended in space. Another weird thing was that all that went through my head was McBride’s pride in his car. The way it had been polished and cherished.
‘Sorry, Twinkle…’ I said out loud, and waited for the impact.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
When it came, the first impact, I felt it in every bone in my body. The Cresta had come down hard, but not nose first, instead landing not quite squarely on all four wheels. I was thrown upwards and collided with the roof. The car bounced and jolted, each impact crushing and tearing metal, tossing me around its inside. Every now and then I would see a flashbulb image of grass and rock in the headlights. More noise. Sound that seemed to fill the universe.
The windscreen shattered and showered me with glass.
Silence.
The engine had died. Or been killed by the crash. There was no more light from the headlamps and I guessed they too had been smashed by the impact.
I tried to work out where I was hurt. Which was difficult, because I hurt all over. Sprawled on the bench seat, I lay still, drinking in the silence and the dark. I was pretty sure I was alive, and I was going to stay that way. Or at least stay alive until I had to tell Twinkletoes what I’d done to his precious Cresta.
I slowly reconnected with my body. I made two fists and then flexed my fingers. Worked my elbows. Rotated my shoulders, getting a jab of pain from the right but not enough to indicate anything more serious than a strain. Tilting myself up slowly, using the steering wheel as a lever, I eased up into a sitting position before running my hands down each leg, rotating each booted foot at the ankle.
I took a long, slow breath. I knew that within a few hours I was really going to start hurting and I’d be as stiff as a board, but I didn’t care. I was alive. I sat in the dark, behind the wheel, as if patiently waiting in a queue of traffic. It was weird. I couldn’t see a thing in the pitch darkness and for a panicked moment wondered if I’d been blinded by a head injury. I ran my fingers over my face and through my hair. No blood. No lacerations. No duck egg bumps.
I felt around for the glove compartment, opening it to get some light into the cabin of the car, but none came on. The electrics must have been shot. I couldn’t find my penlight in my pocket and spent ten minutes fumbling around on the seat and the floor trying to find it, without success. It would be hours before daylight — a full night, in fact — and I couldn’t hang around till then. I decided to get out of the car, but the driver’s door was jammed tight in its twisted frame. I slid over and kicked the passenger door open and crawled out.
It didn’t do me much good. The only light was coming from the moon and stars, and even that was shaded by the brooding black shoulder of the hill above me. What I could see was that I hadn’t come that far: maybe twenty yards from the road, but most of that had been downwards. I stumbled about and moved to the front of the car. More from what I could feel rather than see, it became clear that my continued descent down the slope had been halted by a thicket of brush and tangled wood. I allowed myself a smile at the irony. I looked up at where the road was, most of my journey back to it hidden in the deepest shadow. It would be difficult enough to get back up in the daylight and there was no way I could make it in the dark. Anyway, I had all of my gear still in the car. There was nothing for it: I was going to have to spend the night in the car.
Somehow, without the aid of my penlight, I was able to open the boot and feel around for the sleeping bag. I took it into the back seat, shoving the scattered clothing onto the floor and, still wearing trousers, waterproofs and boots, climbed into it.
With my aches and pains, and with the adrenalin from the accident still coursing through my veins, I knew there was no way I would get to sleep.
As usual, I was wrong.
The sound of a car, up above on the single track road, woke me. By the time I was fully conscious, the engine sound was already fading into the distance. Not that it made much odds: there was no way I could flag down a motorist and cadge a lift.
The pain from being buffeted about in the crash was now localized — to the space between my toenails and the top of my skull. Just like the night before, everything hurt. It just hurt more. I took a minute to gather my senses, then unzipped myself from the sleeping bag and crawled out. The grey morning outside nipped at my hands and face as soon as I got out of the car. The sky was clear, but the morning was still busying itself with the uplands, and would take some time before getting down here. Still, I had a good view all around me. Looking up to the road, I could see where the car had dropped a good five feet before careering down the steep slope, leaving a scar where it had scored through the thin layer of earth that covered the rock. I blessed the five-foot drop for not being a fifty-foot drop, which it would have been if I had come off the road around the corner.
The Cresta had plunged through one thicket and into a second. I worked out that it would be difficult to see from the road, but I would have to get back up there before I could see for sure. The one thing I didn’t want was someone knocking on McBride’s door and telling him that his car had been found trashed and dumped in the middle of nowhere. I knew he would never give me up deliberately, but Twinkle was Twinkle and didn’t sparkle the brightest.
It took me a good half hour to collect all of the stuff from the car, roll up the sleeping bag and pack everything into the rucksack. The only thing I couldn’t fit in was the bivouac, but I lashed that to the back of the rucksack. All in all, with the anorak, the backpack and the professional mountain gear, I would really look the part of the serious mountain rambler. Given that it was November and freezing, it was probably more the part of the seriously deranged mountain rambler.
I decided to get the lay of the land. Leaving my pack by the car, I tried to find my way through the tangle of branches the Cresta had become caught up in. I couldn’t, so I edged my way along it and stepped around the side.
Instinct, that strange old thing the nature of which I had debated, saved me. As soon as I felt the ground go from beneath my feet, I grabbed two fistfuls of branch. My feet scrabbled on the loose gravel, trying to get purchase and get me back from the edge of the cliff that dropped below me.
